E-books Just Want To Be Free
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I’ve known about the excellent Project Gutenberg for a long time now. It was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart and is the oldest digital library. I hadn’t been back to the site for several years because in my mind it was still the place where all you could download was ASCII text versions of books, which must be the worst possible way to read them. Sure, you could change the font to something easier on the eyes, but by definition and by design ASS-KEY lacks all formatting information — forget about line, paragraph or type styles, including bold and italic. When I did stop by for a visit last month I was pleased to see that Project Gutenberg now offers “over 33,000 free e-books to read on your PC, iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, Android or other portable device.” Yes, the days of ASCII are a footnote today. What a difference a little formatting can make. (Another footnote is “Our books are free in the United States because their copyright has expired. They may not be free of copyright in other countries.”) Tonight I see that the 5th Annual World eBook Fair is underway. From July 4th to August 4th you can select from 3,500,000+ free PDF -books. I just downloaded a very good scan of the 1866 edition of Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (with the marvellous illustrations from John Tenniel). I previously download an ePub versionfrom Project Gutenberg with the same illustrations. Very nice!
Meanwhile, the timely and trenchant blog TeleRead (”News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics”) brings word today that the Marc D’Hooghe has updated his Free Literature Site. I don’t know what it was like before, but it’s certainly a treasure now. Under “General” it offers over 400 sources of free digital books. There are 100+ sites for free poetry as well as sites for art books, music (books, scores and audio), and Classical Greek & Latin - Medieval. Beyond that there is also a fine selection of links to:
The site is frequently updated with new discoveries (RSS feed available). Some of the latest unique finds include Hinduism e-books as well as the Dutch version of Jules Verne’s De Kinderen van Kapitein Grant. As Paul Biba notes on TeleRead, “I love browsing in a second-hand bookstore.” |
This is crazy, I understood that copyrights expire on books, but it did not occur to me that people would be taking advantage of this to make the books available to the public in a digital format. I learned about the copyright process at http://library.dts.edu/Pages/RM/Helps/copyright.shtml. It all makes a little more sense now. If I am understanding this correctly, freeliterature.com asks for volunteers to help them get more expired books onto the web. At first I felt oddly about this, similar to the musical limewire days, but it appears that the literary world is doing this differently and following the copyright laws! yaay!
It is a “yaay” moment. Many, perhaps most of these books were previously unavailable because there was insufficient demand to keep them in print. Once digitized the cost of offering them in e-book format is negligible. I’ve been keeping in touch with Marc at http://www.freeliterature.org/. He’s providing an extemely valuable service.
There are also lots of muscial recordings where copyright has expired and which would be inaccessible if not digitized and offered by archivists and enthusiasts. There must be a similar list out there. Or perhaps http://www.freeliterature.org could compile one?
Thanks for writing.